06/04/2025
"I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home." -- Edgar Degas on Gauguin
"I felt stirrings of rebellion: a whole clash between your civilization and my barbarism. Civilization from which you suffer. Barbarism which for me is a rejuvenation." -- Gauguin to August Strindberg
"A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up." -- Gauguin to Georges-Daniel de Monfreid (Tahiti, October 1897)
An artist's life usually pales in interest beside his art. Gauguin may be the exception, for his life reads like that of a star-crossed hero of a romantic novel. He spent the greater part of his childhood in Peru, signed up as a novice pilot aboard a sailing ship at 17, spent a couple years wandering through South America, returned to France to join the Navy, sees action in the Mediterranean during the Franco-Prussian War, leaves the Navy at 23 to become a stockbroker and is by age 35 prosperous and married with two children, and gaining a reputation as an amateur painter. The stock market crash of 1882 leaves him without a job and much of his fortune. Unable to support them any longer, he leaves his family in the care of his wife's parents in Denmark. Over the next six years, he keeps painting, even exhibiting with the Impressionists, but is scrambling for a living, constantly on the move. An emissary for the radical republicans of Spain, a gig with a tarpaulin manufacturer in Roubais, a stint as a bill paster, an assistant to an art dealer, finally off to Panama to work on the Canal, where he contracts malaria and is forced to return after a year. In 1888, his luck changes. The art dealer Theo van Gogh, at his brother's urging, becomes his agent and offers him a monthly stipend if he will join Vincent in Arles. The stay there proves to be ill-fated, though it produces some fine paintings, and Gauguin, increasingly convinced that the industrial civilization of the West is completely "out of joint," moves to Brittany to live with and paint the peasants of that backward region of western France. Two years later, in the quest for an environment unsullied by the least trace of civilization, he moves to Tahiti -- a "missionary in reverse." as he put it -- where he spends all but two of the remaining years of his life, and occupies a modest grave to this day adorned only with one of his ceramic sculptures. Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence" was inspired by his life.
Lure of the Exotic? Flight from Civilization? Quest for the Pristine? No matter what label one places on his unique career, the paintings and drawings remain as a living testimony to an exceptional and original talent. As with many of the other MWW Exhibits, the works here are arranged in rough chronological order and the selection aspires towards a representative sample of the artist's entire output. It also includes all of Gauguin's self-portraits, most which are accompanied by commentaries on various periods or aspects of his life.
Gauguin was prolific in several other media besides painting. Along with the over 300 paintings it includes, this gallery has a selection of his sculptures, watercolors, woodcuts and drawings. More of these form part of the MWW Sculpture Garden and Modern Prints & Drawings galleries.
See also the five MWW Van Gogh exhibits for a look at an artist closely associated with Gauguin.
